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Mark Shuttleworth Declares Mir A Performance Win

07-09-2013, 10:40 AM

Phoronix: Mark Shuttleworth Declares Mir A Performance Win

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been running the Mir Display Server for the past two weeks. After doing so, he's very happy with the Mir experience in Ubuntu 13.10 at this stage in its development and already feels that it's smoother than with X. He's blogged about his experience of running Mir on Ubuntu Linux...

Subjective feelings of performance are more complex than any mere benchmarks can show. I remember playing with Wayland on Rebecca Black Linux when that was first released. Everything about it subjectively felt way better than X.org, but I doubt hard numbers would've backed me up on it back then. They might these days, but this was when RBL was first released.

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I'm going to keep my mouth shut for now about future predictions, Mir is still in early development. Considering that it was only unveiled a few months ago, and we already have a working desktop, it's doing very well IMO.

I wouldn't exactly call the performance of Mir a "win" at this point, more like a "decent start". I don't see myself using Mir/Wayland until there is no performance loss compared to X, or at the very least proprietary drivers are supported.

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We take a lot of flack for every decision we make in Ubuntu, because so many people are affected.
But I remind the team – failure to act when action is needed is as much a failure as taking the wrong kind of action might be.
We have a responsibility to our users to explore difficult territory.
Many difficult choices in the past are the bedrock of our usefulness to a very wide audience today.

Building a graphics stack is not a decision made lightly – it’s not an afternoon’s hacking.
The decision was taken based on a careful consideration of technical factors.
We need a graphics stack that works reliably across a very wide range of hardware, that performs predictably,
that provides a consistent quality of user experience on many different desktop environments.

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I'm going to keep my mouth shut for now about future predictions, Mir is still in early development. Considering that it was only unveiled a few months ago, and we already have a working desktop, it's doing very well IMO.

I wouldn't exactly call the performance of Mir a "win" at this point, more like a "decent start". I don't see myself using Mir/Wayland until there is no performance loss compared to X, or at the very least proprietary drivers are supported.

Wow you are easy to impress. It just takes a fork of XWayland to run a fullscreen X Server on Mir and people think Mir is actually going somewhere. Quite nice that the Wayland guys did all the hard work years ago making changes to mesa etc. to make something like this possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...wMi-eY#t=6189s But hey let's ignore that. Canonical forked something behind closed doors and made it public a few month ago and are now showing hacky desktops that basically run a rootless X Server. W00t GO MIR!

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please someone push the super key on a i945 system
enjoy
is it even possible to test mir right now? as the mir server runs xorg server 1.13 and the saucy repo without xmir runs 1.14 resulting in me having issues upgrading

BUT
the jumpy Lenovo touchpad issue has comepletely gone for good (what a relief!)

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It's interesting to see that the wayland guys have been very careful about doing things properly and not pushing beta software out to users, as has happened in some transitions on the linux stack before (like pulseaudio), but then canonical shows up and does the good old "here goes something" bit.

Honestly I'm torn. I use Ubuntu, and plan on continuing doing so, but I think Mir is just the result of canonical devs just giving into NIH, while Wayland seems to be the path forward. But then, hurd was proper and linux was something. Who knows what will happen.

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It's interesting to see that the wayland guys have been very careful about doing things properly and not pushing beta software out to users, as has happened in some transitions on the linux stack before.

The wayland guys don't have the power to do anything. No other distro cares enough about Wayland to beta test it for them, so of course it hasn't been pushed out. Canonical on the other hand, has a time frame they must meet, and they care deeply about Mir, so they're going to do whatever it takes. They think it will be past the beta stage by the time Ubuntu 13.10 is released, but they still need to have it tested in real world conditions before the LTS in the spring.

I appreciate what the wayland community is doing, but don't give them credit for making a decision they never had the power (and by extension, the temptation) to make.

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Wow you are easy to impress. It just takes a fork of XWayland to run a fullscreen X Server on Mir and people think Mir is actually going somewhere. Quite nice that the Wayland guys did all the hard work years ago making changes to mesa etc. to make something like this possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...wMi-eY#t=6189s But hey let's ignore that. Canonical forked something behind closed doors and made it public a few month ago and are now showing hacky desktops that basically run a rootless X Server. W00t GO MIR!

Mir is currently in Ubuntu 13.10, working in action. You can download the daily build and use it NOW. Where is Wayland? I hear talk for years but nothing in action. Rebecca Black Linux....lol?

I know Wayland started everything & Mir forked it, kinda a dick thing to do, but welcome to open source! People fork things and make them better and/or the way they want. Isn't this a fundamental part of open source?? When did Linux turn communist and you can only use what you're told to?

Not saying Mir is better at this point, but it's closer to an actual working desktop, it's a fact regardless if you like or dislike Canonical.

I'm not a Wayland or Mir fanboy, just going to use whatever works the best. I have no stake in whoever wins the great display server war of 2013. It would be nice to see Wayland used instead of Mir, but seriously, are politics more important than performance? It's just too early to tell at this point what will be the outcome! Let them develop and use whatever works best?